Los Alamos, New Mexico

Los Alamos, the birthplace of nuclear weaponry. This is a city that was filled with people but officially didn't exist for many years. So many scientists, so much secrecy and security, so much money and so many lies. I say that and I also know that there was so much positive research and development done here but nearly all of it was over-shadowed by the weaponry research. I speak of the Lab because if there was no Los Alamos National Laboratory, there'd be no Los Alamos.

The city of Los Alamos is busy and prosperous. In driving around the residential sections you can't help but notice that this was originally a military base: there's converted barracks everywhere. There's been lots of new housing built also, but for many years, the federal government kept a stranglehold on land to develop housing on. Then I remember that fateful day several years ago when the US Forest Service decided to do a "controlled burn" in the Jemez Mountains just west of Los Alamos: a hot, dry day with the wind doing 30 and gusting to 60 (ideal conditions for a "controlled burn", right?) And they burned a pretty good chunk of the city, mostly in the newest neighborhoods. That was the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000.

For these photos, I drove into town in the afternoon on a beautiful day in early March. It was shift change time so the traffic was pretty heavy. Once I parked my vehicle, I took photos of what I was interested in but trying to move to another location in town for more wasn't going to happen: I wanted to get to the White Rock Overlook before it got too dark anyway. So there's no photos of the Lab itself here, partly because of the security guards, the traffic and the changes in the roads in town to accommodate even more security. Things I would have taken photos of were, consequently, hard to get to. I'll be back.

I did stop at Fuller Lodge, that place in the center of Los Alamos where Robert Oppenheimer spent some time as a teenager that made him suggest Los Alamos as the place where the Manhattan Project could best be carried out in total secrecy during World War II.

Technically, Los Alamos is an incorporated city/county that includes White Rock. Instead of a city council there is an elected county council that runs everything from the "town" offices in Los Alamos.